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So many people don't like killpoints, as they can be seen as unfair to horde armies. I know, as a Guard player, I really hate them.

My idea is to work out victory based on the proportion of killpoints you have taken. Say team A kills 6/11 killpoints and team B kills 8/17 killpoints. As Team A has killed a greater proportion, they win.

A quick and dirty solution to the extremely unfair system we currently have. Much faster to work out than victory points too.

Unfair to Hordes? I run the green tide and see them as an advantage, for me of couse. Maybe unfair to the people playing against me or a horde army. As killing the entire unit of 30 (or more if using different army with large model count) is very hard.





(edit- I can't spellez goodz)

What kill points hurt are the armies that take small, min-sized units such as MSU-armies.

As it is right now, it isn't very balanced. Maybe worth 1KP per 100pts of the unit, with a minimum of 1. Thus 10 terminators would be worth 4KP's.

Either that or go back to Victory Points.

jy2 wrote:What kill points hurt are the armies that take small, min-sized units such as MSU-armies.

That was the point, you know, to make people take larger units.

The entire purpose of KPs is to balance out the massive advantage armies comprised of many small, cheap units have in the 2/3rds of games which are centered on Objectives.

Proportional KPs and VPs both absolutely fail to do this; they both just make the MSU armies even better.

Mannahnin wrote:The entire purpose of KPs is to balance out the massive advantage armies comprised of many small, cheap units have in the 2/3rds of games which are centered on Objectives.

Proportional KPs and VPs both absolutely fail to do this; they both just make the MSU armies even better.

+1

And, horde armies tend to do really well in KP.

You're running guard, are they on foot? If so, have you combined the squads?

I would say that the best way to solve your killpoint problem as Guard, especially if you're running footguard, is to blob up and get some Commissars. However, if you're doing Mech Vet? Well killpoints is the cost you pay for having such an army. It's a balancing factor, and it is designed to hurt armies that run MSU.

Try the system posted on BoLS.

You take all the kill points you have remaining and add them to the kill points you got from your opponent's dead stuff.

Your opponent does the same.

The difference between the two gives you a winner (although a 1 or 2 point difference should probably be a draw here).

For example: You have 6 units left alive and killed 3 of mine for a total of 9 Kill Points. I have 2 units left alive and killed 4 for a total of 6 Kill Points. You win because you have 3 over me.

And KPs does indeed hurt horde armies just certain types of horde armies. Honestly, losing 50% of my forces to you losing 90% and you can still win . . . seems a little counter-intuitive for a mission designed around simply slugging it out. I understand the attempt at balance but it seems to just fail still. But as guard you can still horde it up in 1850 and only give up less than 8 kill points if you run it right while still being highly competitive. Regardless, if you are unhappy with KPs try using that system and see if you like it. If you don't, you didn't lose anything, but I like the system because it generally falls in line with what a straight victory point win would have been without having to resort to adding up all those numbers.

What's wrong with VPs?

Phototoxin wrote:What's wrong with VPs?

The fact that you can have an 85-ish point unit of Stormtroopers deepstrike, kill a Landraider, and then die.

The Space Marine players gets 85 VP, you get 250+. Is that really fair? (Not a marine whiner, just using a good example. )

Phototoxin wrote:What's wrong with VPs?

It encourages "makes its points back" style play that mired previous editions of play.

grayspark wrote:

Phototoxin wrote:What's wrong with VPs?

The fact that you can have an 85-ish point unit of Stormtroopers deepstrike, kill a Landraider, and then die.

The Space Marine players gets 85 VP, you get 250+. Is that really fair? (Not a marine whiner, just using a good example. )

In a sense it is fair, but it also encourages everyone to take lots of cheap units, and leave expensive stuff like land raiders and terminators on the shelf.

The KP/Objective mission dynamic creates a tension between two different army list priorities. In Objective missions you want as many units as you can possibly get. But in KP missions that's a liability.

There's a prominent school of thought in competitive army list design that says "never mind KPs", because the advantage you get in maneuvering and in distributing offensive power (shooting and assault) more flexibly by having more units is so great that they honestly think it's dumb to even bother reducing the number of KPs in your list.

VPs and proportional KPs just hand more advantages to the MSU armies. Because it's always harder to get 250 VPs out of two units than it is to get 250 VPs out of one unit. And because proportional KPs completely negate the purpose of KPs as a counterbalance to the MSU armies' advantages in the objective games.

In 3rd ed and 4th ed most missions were VPs, with bonuses for objectives, and MSU was pretty much the only design priority. I played that way for nine years and IMO 5th edition is an improvement and a nice change of pace.

I also think KP is skewed. I fought a Sanguinary guard army, and lost the game 13-12 despite the fact that all my opponent had left was a single death company dreadnought on the table. I had 2 land raiders and 2 full crusader squads. Its situations like that which suck. I'd have to have tabled my opponent to win in that game - that can't be right can it?

It's probably not the best, but it's one of the examples of how the system isn't perfect. However, I think it's better than the alternative of MSU spam just being the best hands down.

ChrisWWII wrote:It's probably not the best, but it's one of the examples of how the system isn't perfect.

Absolutely agreed. VPs wasn't perfect and neither are KPs. You can't make the system perfect.

liam0404 wrote:I'd have to have tabled my opponent to win in that game - that can't be right can it?

Which is why I won't attend any tournament that has a soft score of sportsmanship anymore. Too many players will tank your sportsmanship score if you table them (because they feel it's bad form) and yet too often it can be the only way to win. THIS IS THE REAL PROBLEM WITH KP MISSIONS, not the mission itself, but the people forcing you to table them in order to win a game and then tanking you on sportsmanship if you do. Having said that, let's face it, poor sportsmanship scores is also a tactic people have used on a regular basis at the RTT level to keep them competitive regardless of whether you were a jerk, a nice guy, fun to play with, a rules lawyer, tabled them, etc . .

Mannahnin wrote:There's a prominent school of thought in competitive army list design that says "never mind KPs", because the advantage you get in maneuvering and in distributing offensive power (shooting and assault) more flexibly by having more units is so great that they honestly think it's dumb to even bother reducing the number of KPs in your list.

That's pretty much been my philosophy.

But even in 4th and 3rd, I still saw the big stuff being taken on a regular basis so VPs didn't seem to discourage taking the expensive stuff in the older additions enough to take them out of the game. I still saw plenty of Land Raiders, plenty of terminator squads, plenty of Leman Russ Battle Tanks, etc. . . While yes, a small squad can murder an expensive unit, an expensive unit can murder a good bit of your army if it stays alive. So the trade off for taking an expensive unit was worth the risk to a large number of players.

Even though I posted the one system as an alternative, I don't believe there is truly an easy fix. KPs (as I believe victory points do as well) have a place in the game as do objective based games. I think rather than focusing on the ills of KPs we should really be discussing a good alternative to having 2 objective based missions. Imho.

The good news . . . we are still better off than Fantasy.

liam0404 wrote:I also think KP is skewed. I fought a Sanguinary guard army, and lost the game 13-12 despite the fact that all my opponent had left was a single death company dreadnought on the table. I had 2 land raiders and 2 full crusader squads. Its situations like that which suck. I'd have to have tabled my opponent to win in that game - that can't be right can it?

It absolutely can be right. Despite him fighting the game with four fewer units than you had, and correspondingly having four fewer things to maneuver, shoot, and assault with, he killed more units than you did. His army outfought yours. You didn't have to table him to win. You just had to keep two more of your units alive OR table him. Either one would have won the game for you.

Mannahnin is right, even from a 'realitic' point of view, war is not faught to kill each other. They are fought over objectives. Sometimes, even if you've killed most of the opponents force, but they still have something left alive....they win, as long as their objective was to just have something left alive. It'd be a pyrhhic victory, but they'd still win.

Guardsman 101 wrote:

ChrisWWII wrote:It's probably not the best, but it's one of the examples of how the system isn't perfect.

Absolutely agreed. VPs wasn't perfect and neither are KPs. You can't make the system perfect.

Agreed.

Guardsman 101 wrote:Which is why I won't attend any tournament that has a soft score of sportsmanship anymore. Too many players will tank your sportsmanship score if you table them (because they feel it's bad form) and yet too often it can be the only way to win. THIS IS THE REAL PROBLEM WITH KP MISSIONS, not the mission itself, but the people forcing you to table them in order to win a game and then tanking you on sportsmanship if you do. Having said that, let's face it, poor sportsmanship scores is also a tactic people have used on a regular basis at the RTT level to keep them competitive regardless of whether you were a jerk, a nice guy, fun to play with, a rules lawyer, tabled them, etc . .

I disagree with you on two points here, and partially on another.

1. People being sore losers is not a problem with KP missions. It's a problem with them lacking perspective and being immature. If the army matchup was such a KP mismatch that you practically had to table them to win, the proper response on their part is to recognize that they have an advantage going in, and respect your accomplishment if you manage to win despite your handicap.

1a. I support Sports scoring, but I strongly disagree with 1-5 or 1-10 subjective scoring. Some forms of checklist work okay; and the system I champion is pass/fail, where you only give the person a downcheck if their attitude and behavior during the game make it actively unenjoyable to play. And where one downcheck is a tiny penalty; that they ramp up if multiple opponents check it, minimizing the impact of chipmunking.

2. IME abuse of Sportsmanship scoring is not something that happens on "a regular basis". It's something a small percentage of jerks do, which gets talked about a lot. I've played in or run close to a hundred RTs, GTs, leagues and other tournaments over the last 12 years, in ten different US states, and IME it's actually fairly rare.

Guardsman 101 wrote:

Mannahnin wrote:There's a prominent school of thought in competitive army list design that says "never mind KPs", because the advantage you get in maneuvering and in distributing offensive power (shooting and assault) more flexibly by having more units is so great that they honestly think it's dumb to even bother reducing the number of KPs in your list.

That's pretty much been my philosophy.

And it's a philosophy that works for a lot of folks. My tournament team has a few of them, although several of us deliberately design armies to compete with the top builds while using a lower average number of KPs, which gives us an advantage against folks of your philosophy in the KP rounds.

Guardsman 101 wrote:But even in 4th and 3rd, I still saw the big stuff being taken on a regular basis so VPs didn't seem to discourage taking the expensive stuff in the older additions enough to take them out of the game. I still saw plenty of Land Raiders, plenty of terminator squads, plenty of Leman Russ Battle Tanks, etc. . . While yes, a small squad can murder an expensive unit, an expensive unit can murder a good bit of your army if it stays alive. So the trade off for taking an expensive unit was worth the risk to a large number of players.

This seems to contradict your expressed opinion above that you're of the "more units trumps KP considerations" philosophy. If you truly believe that, then you also believe that people using those small expensive units in 3rd & 4th ed were handicapping themselves; which they were. I almost never saw LRs in either of those editions. Leman Russes were reasonably common, but not that expensive. Terminators were never, ever seen in competitive armies until they get the 5+ invulnerable, and rare even then.

Guardsman 101 wrote:Even though I posted the one system as an alternative, I don't believe there is truly an easy fix. KPs (as I believe victory points do as well) have a place in the game as do objective based games. I think rather than focusing on the ills of KPs we should really be discussing a good alternative to having 2 objective based missions. Imho.

The good news . . . we are still better off than Fantasy.

I love the objective games; I do think that we need to be careful about preserving the rulebook's ratio of number of objectives, although I also like seeing other mission types introduced (like bringing back variations on Table Quarters), as long as designers are careful about them. No argument about Fantasy. It used to be my favorite game; now it's second place.

I too have played a good deal of tournaments and chipmunking is not nearly as rare as you are making it out to be. It is rare in the percentage of players that do it, but when even one person per tournament does it . . . it means that you see it at nearly every tournament. So yes, the percentage of people that do it is rare, but the percentage of tournaments I've seen it at, is quite high (which are not contradictory statements for those reading this sentence).

I don't disagree that it's poor sportsmanship, immaturity and a lack of perspective for people to tank you (even if it's only a few points off your soft score) when you table them. But it is still a problem with KPs because you are forced to table someone and they have a reaction to it. No problem simply rests in the system itself, but people's reaction to said system, which therefore does indeed make KPs, when combined with sportsmanship a problem. Now, in the alternative system for sportsmanship you gave, that works well. Too bad a lot of places I've gone still use the 0-6, 1-5, whatever systems. Tabling seems to get you a 4/5 or 5/6 at most. Losing even one point a game can make a big deal and while I don't mind not placing top 3, it doesn't mean I too don't have a reaction to it. But, in all honesty, I can't stand seeing someone who got tabled give their opponent a point or two off because, they "didn't feel the game was quite as fun as the others" which seems to be an all to common response to getting tabled. Let's face it, the best games are close games and to some folks, getting tabled doesn't make a game "feel" close (even though it might well be).

Yes, you never saw a ton of LRs or Terminators in one particular list, but it was perfectly reasonable to see one or the other in lists at tournaments. They might not have been competitive but they were still in reasonable abundance. I was simply disagreeing with your point that no one took them and explaining why some people did. They took them, they just didn't tend to be the winning army lists. The problem we, on this forum, often make is to forget that competitive lists weren't and aren't the only lists that make their way to tournaments when arguing a point. There are always a fair number of sub-par lists that make their way to tourneys. Having said that, I agree, the competitive lists didn't take them or took them very rarely even if I don't 100% agree on your reasoning why.

ChrisWWII wrote:Mannahnin is right, even from a 'realitic' point of view, war is not faught to kill each other. They are fought over objectives. Sometimes, even if you've killed most of the opponents force, but they still have something left alive....they win, as long as their objective was to just have something left alive. It'd be a pyrhhic victory, but they'd still win.

Edit: A Pyrrhic victory, by definition is not a victory. It is still a loss because you can't maintain/capitalize/exploit/whatever you supposed victory. At best, it's a draw.

liam0404 wrote:I also think KP is skewed. I fought a Sanguinary guard army, and lost the game 13-12 despite the fact that all my opponent had left was a single death company dreadnought on the table. I had 2 land raiders and 2 full crusader squads. Its situations like that which suck. I'd have to have tabled my opponent to win in that game - that can't be right can it?

I think in your particular case there were clearly a good number of kill points floating around on both sides (17 to 14?) on the table. I think what people are more frustrated about are the games where one player brings 6 KPs and the other brings 18 KPs. In other words, where there is a massive disparity in the KP total that sometimes can't be resolved simply because of the particular structure of a codex.

mannahnin wrote:although I also like seeing other mission types introduced (like bringing back variations on Table Quarters), as long as designers are careful about them.

Agreed. I loved table quarters but would like them to be careful too if they try to bring back a mission like Cleanse

....A pyrhhic victory is a victory. Not a loss. It's a victory that may have broken your army completely, but it's a victory in the sense that you completed your objective, while your opponent failed to accomplish theirs.

ChrisWWII wrote:....A pyrhhic victory is a victory. Not a loss. It's a victory that may have broken your army completely, but it's a victory in the sense that you completed your objective, while your opponent failed to accomplish theirs.

I actually like pyrhhic victories a lot in this game. The person who gets the victory feel like they stole a win from the jaws of defeat- which always feels great, and the loser still gets the warm fuzzy feeling of watching his army kick ass up and down the table.

basically, in a war game, everybody wins. Unless its a tournament where a win is a win and a loss is a loss.

Agreed. By definition a Pyrric Victory is still a victory; just one with a very high price and some drawbacks.

I agree with akaean that these are often the most satisfying games, where both players did lots of damage and saw their armies inflict devastation, but one guy barely eked out the win.

Guardsman101, overall I suspect we agree on more than we disagree on.

Every victory is 40k is a Pyrrhic (two "r" and one "h") victory. That's the only way GW can have centuries and centuries of warfare, but not having to advance the fluff!